I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Next UN Chief? Irina Or Kristalina, Both Bulgarian Women

NEW YORK — Inside the Bulgarian brawl
for UN chief. A behind-the-scenes primary emerges in Sofia, Brussels,
Washington and Moscow. In a wide-open competition for the top job at the United
Nations, two women have propelled themselves to the top of nearly every
handicapper’s shortlist.

The problem is both these women come from the same country, Bulgaria,
where the government now finds itself in a possible no-win situation: By
snubbing one, they could lose their best chance ever to put a compatriot in
such a prominent international role.

Neither UNESCO Director-General Irina
Bokova nor Kristalina Georgieva, a European Commission vice president, would
talk publicly about their UN ambitions. But as the campaign to succeed UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon approaches in early 2016, a behind-the-scenes
primary — full of jostling, polling, diplomatic posturing and whispering campaigns
— has emerged in Sofia, Brussels, Washington and Moscow.

Under a new U.N.-mandated nomination
process, the government of Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov must put
forward its candidate for the secretary-general slot early next year. “Borissov
is in a difficult position at the moment,” said Kancho Stoychev, a Bulgarian
pollster and Bokova supporter.
“Kristalina Georgieva is from his party and on the other side he has a
very capable lady.”

Whomever the government’s chooses could
fall prey to international politicking. In this version of a diplomatic
Catch-22, if Bulgaria puts forward Georgieva and Moscow thinks Washington
swayed the choice, Russia could shift its support to another candidate. Ditto
for Washington, if Bukova gets the nod over Georgieva in a way that’s seen to
please Moscow.

A certain level of hype

A Bulgarian polling firm tested the two
women’s appeal within the country earlier this year, with Georgieva coming out
on top. Her supporters note that she’s well-liked by Victoria Nuland, the
assistant U.S. Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and former
World Bank head Robert Zoellick. The very fact that we are seriously
considering a Bulgarian is creating a certain level of hype

Because of her ties to the current
government, sources say that Georgieva, who previously served as the EU
commissioner for humanitarian aid, is more likely to get the nod. But that
isn’t stopping Bokova, who has started an aggressive informal PR push to
promote her candidacy.

Former U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations Bill Richardson and former Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski both
lent their backing to Bokova earlier this month at a UNESCO event in Sofia.

But last week, the German daily Die
Welt reported Bokova had said in her official biography that she was the
Bulgarian foreign minister in the late-1990s, when in fact she was the acting
foreign minister for only a few months. She told the paper this was a mistake
and corrected her website after the publication’s reporter first inquired about
the subject.

The United Nations effectively fired the starting gun on the race two
weeks ago, sending out a letter to all national governments that calls for them
to nominate candidates. Plenty of non-Bulgarian candidates — including names like
former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, former New Zealand prime minister
Helen Clarke and Croatian Foreign Minister Vesna Pusić — are expected to make
strong runs for the top U.N. slot, which comes open January 1, 2017, when Ban
Ki-moon ends his decade-long tenure.

But the Security Council will ultimately offer up just one name for the
193-member General Assembly to either approve or deny, meaning veto-holding
members — and the United States and Russia in particular — hold an outsized
amount of power over the choice. “The big question is where Moscow and
Washington stand on the two candidates,” said Richard Gowan, a fellow at the
European Council on Foreign Relations.

And due to growing demands for a woman
UN secretary-general — and a Russian push to put an Eastern European in the top
slot — a country with just 7 million people and the lowest per-capita GDP in
the European Union seems unusually well-positioned. “The very fact that we are
seriously considering a Bulgarian is creating a certain level of hype,” said
one Bulgarian supporter of Georgieva. “Both of them are very able people.”

The Russia question

Moscow has been the driving force
behind the push for an East European secretary-general; having someone from the
region who understands the Russian viewpoint, the thinking goes, would allow
the country to flex its muscles at a venue often dominated by Western voices
and points of view.

Russia pushed for the recent nomination process letter to include
language calling for “geographic rotation” — which amounts to code, U.N.
watchers tell POLITICO, for Eastern Europe. Other members of the Security
Council objected but agreed to the compromise phrase of regional diversity,
according to a source in a U.N. Security Council delegation.

UNESCO Chief Irina Bokova.

Both Bokova and Georgieva speak Russian
and have longstanding ties to Russia. Georgieva worked for the World Bank for
almost 20 years, including a stint as the head of their Russian office. Bokova
is the daughter of a noted Bulgarian communist who ran the largest Bulgarian
Party newspaper — Rabotnichesko Delo — and she was educated at one of Moscow’s
elite universities.

“A
lot of people rather nastily imply that because Bokova comes from a well-known
communist family, she must be Moscow’s candidate. I think that this is rather
cheap tittle-tattle, but Bokova will face more questions about the family
issue,” says Gowan, of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

By contrast, “nobody is quite sure whether
Georgieva’s history with Russia … works for or against her.” One Bulgarian
source said that Georgieva’s reputation as a non-ideological technocrat has
made her amenable to the Russians, who have signaled that they would not veto
her.

Followers of the race say it’s hard to
gauge how strongly the Russians support Bokova, but that her connections to the
country make her their preferred candidate. Bokova and Russian President Vladimir
Putin met in St. Petersburg in early-December and had kind words for each
other. A spokesman for the Russian Embassy at the United Nations declined to
comment, and the only official word is the country wants an Eastern European.

Sofia’s choice

In a speech at the U.N. General
Assembly in September, Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev said that the “time
has come that a woman from Eastern Europe be entrusted with the highest
position in the U.N. Secretariat.” But faced with two prominent choices who
check those boxes, the government has been cagey about whom it would nominate.

Bokova has been mentioned for several
years as a potential candidate. Seen as deeply partisan in Sofia, the
63-year-old former acting minister of foreign affairs in 2013 pushed the
then-Socialist government to nominate her as the country’s candidate, and sources
say that the government effectively backed her in the days before it was
toppled following massive public protests.

The staid traditions of the United
Nations dictate that no one be seen as thirsting for the post. But the
government never submitted a formal letter to the United Nations General
Assembly endorsing her. Even though Georgieva, 62, has never
actually held a position in Bulgarian government, she is from the same GERB
political party as Borrisov and many observers feel that she has the inside
track.

The matchup is drawing enough interest
domestically that a Bulgarian market strategy firm, Alpha Research, conducted a
poll in mid-November about the two women. Georgieva was seen as the more
competent of the two, with a 62 percent approval rating among respondents as
opposed to just 44 percent for Bokova. The results also showed that 25 percent
of the participants approved of either candidate, “because of the prestige the
position would extend to Bulgaria.”

A wide-open race

Jean Krasno, a U.N. historian who also
leads a group called WomanSG, which has been vocally advocating for a woman to
lead the United Nations, says that both Bokova and Georgieva are both on her
group’s list of “extraordinary women.”

Bokova didn’t respond to POLITICO’s
request for comment; her office cited a busy schedule. Georgieva told POLITICO
in November: “I’m very honored for my name to be mentioned but I have a job that
takes my full attention and I’m doing it. My philosophy in life has always been
to do the job I have.”

But in the last month, both Bulgarians have been in New York and
Washington for meetings with high ranking U.N. officials, ambassadors and U.S.
officials. In recent weeks, Georgieva has met with the Chinese, British and
French ambassadors to the United Nations, according to another source inside a
United Nations delegation. Similarly, Bokova met with the French ambassador and
the United Kingdom’s deputy ambassador. To be sure, there’s nothing out of the
ordinary about either woman meeting with high-level officials, given their
current job portfolios. But the chatter level about both is high.

EU Vice President Kristalina Georgieva.

When it comes to the United States,
there is one potential hiccup: Bokova presided over UNESCO at a moment when it
allowed the Palestinian Authority to become a member, prompting outrage in the
U.S. Congress, which forced the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama
to drop its funding for the organization. (Though that may change soon.)

Still, a conference hosted by Bokova
this month in Sofia on countering violent extremism, which was organized by
UNESCO and the Atlantic Club of Bulgaria, turned into a love-fest for her
candidacy. Richardson, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and Kwaśniewski,
a longtime Bokova ally, both addressed the forum and voiced their support for
her.

While noting that he does not speak
with the U.S. administration, Richardson – unprompted — mentioned Bokova’s
potential as a possible secretary-general in an on-air chat. “Now this is my
individual view, and I’m not speaking for the U.S. government, but [Bokova] has
a lot of support,” Richardson said.

Gowan said that because of Georgieva’s
experience running bureaucracies at the European Commission and World Bank, “a
lot of U.N. staffers are now quite excited about her candidacy.” Krasno noted
that the changed process — and the fact that countries are being asked to
nominate candidates for the first time — makes this race particularly
unpredictable. “We’re really dealing in unchartered territory,” she said.